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LinkedIn Launches ‘Connections Beta’

The professional networking site LinkedIn today launched a private beta of a new feature, Connections, that allows you to better manage your lists of LinkedIn connections. The key feature is the ability to group your connections by assigning tags to them. Once grouped, you can then send messages to the entire group simply by selecting it. Thus, you could tag certain people as “friends” and then simply select that category to send all your friends a message.

The tagging feature starts out in a sort of smart mode. It pre-assigns tags based on connections it can decipher. For example, connections who were law school classmates of mine were already tagged “classmates.”

The new feature also incorporates “type-ahead search,” which lets you type just a couple letters in the search field to be taken to the matching name within your list of connections.

I received an e-mail from LinkedIn today inviting me to try it. I am not sure how many invitations went out, but I know from monitoring Twitter that I was not alone in receiving it.